Background on Conventional Systems.
The inventors here have recognized several technical problems with such conventional systems, as explained below.
Robotic automation is being increasingly proselytized in the industrial and manufacturing sectors to increase production efficiency. Typically, complex industrial tasks cannot be satisfied by individual robots, rather coordination and information sharing is required.
Integration of robotics, cyber-physical systems and the cloud has come to the forefront with Industry 4.0 requirements. Industry 4.0 proposes a “smart factory” solution, wherein modular cyber-physical systems coordinate to make decentralized decisions. Some of the key requirements for Industry 4.0 include interoperability, information transparency, technical assistance and decentralized decisions.
Warehouse and factory floor automation has been explored with respect to these requirements. Herein, Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are employed in the warehousing environment to move products from one place to another by using networked robotics or cloud robotics. However, a centralized robotic control and coordination of such AGVs is ill-advised in such settings, due to high failure probabilities, inefficient overheads and lack of scalability.